In the far future, a dormant android awakes on a vast starship to find humanity's last hopes rest with him.
Launched to carry the human species across the galaxy, Starship's generations-long journey has crumbled as machines took everything from their human creators, including life itself. Given a mission by humanity's last digital remnants, Gamma must traverse Starship's vast, dangerous bulk in search of a way to preserve Starship's original purpose.
Yet Gamma isn't the only intelligent machine on Starship, and some want a very different end as the spacecraft approaches its final destination. As he confronts the mechs that've claimed Starship as their own, the key to Gamma's survival will come not only from his metal fists, but from figuring out why Starship's humans fell in the first place.
A far-future science fiction action adventure that blends the real and virtual worlds, The Farthest Star kicks off a series that will have you wondering whether our biology or our beliefs make us human.
I spin stories in a frosty house in Madison, WI, primarily owned by a pair of cats. After getting sucked into the working grind in the economic crash of the 2008, I found myself spending boring meetings soaring through space and going on grand adventures.
Eventually, spending time with podcasting, screenplays, short stories and other novels, I found a story I could fall into and a cast of characters both entertaining and full of heart. That story became Wild Nines, and eventually became a trilogy.
I've got a basket, maybe even a barrel of ideas for more stories coming after these, so if you'd like to see what I'm scribing, feel free to visit me at adamrknight.com or sign up for my newsletter at http://bit.ly/bkbnewswn.
It got hoaky when the MCs sparked a ditritus-assembled dog to animation and it behaved as a pet and protector. Hoo boy.
Interesting concept but ultimately flat imo. A massive shuffle of cards where each is a scenario, but the ultimate meaning to the whole excerise is rather banal.
But 3 Stars because it's readable and if you're in the mood, have-at.
I will give this book credit for having a very interesting and unique concept. There are no living, human characters in this book, and instead the reader follows the journey of a humanoid android through a space craft that has been destroyed presumably by the former human occupants.
That said the book was confusing and suffered from excessive world building at the expense of plot and character development. Gamma’s internal struggle with humanity is interesting, but as the only attempt at character development it doesn’t carry the novel. Otherwise, I found his character to be relatively boring. And in a book with only 3 characters total, this was significant.
I did enjoy the other two, female characters in the book. Although one of these characters is not introduced until the end. I personally don’t feel like this makes up for the flaws in this book enough to make it a worthwhile read.
It wasn’t very long into this that I started getting Pilgrim’s Progress vibes – a book I’ve not read in a long, long time. What you’ve got here is the same basic premise, just without all the heaven and hell, and sin and grace.
Gamma awakes with no recollection of who he is or where he came from. But he does have a mission. He sets out on a quest. Along the way, he meets various characters, who set him off on various side quests or try to block his path or deceive him. Some travel with him for a while, others come and go, and some disappear quite quickly.
Ultimately, his quest is in search of what it means to be human.
For me, it felt like it could have been a little bit shorter. But definitely a worthwhile read.
I found this to be highly imaginative and well thought out. I have kind of a soft spot for stories from a sentient machine point of view. So much of sci-fi these days seems to revolve around a military plot with galactic battles that after awhile, just have a sameness to them. Not that they can't be excellent, but you can already see the arc of the story 20 pages in.
I basically like the smaller stories, either poignant or thoughtful, because that's where the surprises lie. For example, C. Robert Cargill's 2 stories Sea of Rust and Day Zero fit the bill and were a pleasure to read. This is like that. The entire story takes place on one ship - a gargantuan one to be sure - but there's no fleet actions going on here.
The author shows promise. His characters are interesting. He leaves plenty of mystery for future books but still largely satisfies as a one-off. That said, I would have liked to see a better resolution for one of the main characters rather than holding off for at least Book 2. To say which one I think would be a spoiler alert, but it nagged at me as I thought they would come back in this book to resolve - at least better, that character.
At first I was a little confused and didn't realize what the author was doing in setting up the story. But as the realization dawned I became intrigued by the concept and the grand scheme of the novel--- AI becoming human.
I listened to the audio version of this book, and I have to say that the narrator (Jay Aasang) was fantastic. He made excellent use of different tones and accents to distinguish the characters.
The Farthest Star is an adequate but not particularly compelling scifi novel. We follow the adventures of the android Gamma, our POV protagonist, as he tries to understand who he is and how he should respond to the commands others are placing on him. ** Spoilers follow **
I did enjoy the setup of the novel. Starship is a generation ship carrying humans to another world. When Gamma is activated, everything has collapsed, and Gamma is receiving orders from the stored digital avatars of Starship's last human masters. As he begins to obey these orders, Gamma has to learn everything: who he is, who the Voices are giving the orders, what Starship is, where to go, what to do. The tension of watching him figure these things out in the face of hidden motives and outright manipulation makes for a dramatic story.
However, a number of features of the book detracted from the story. 1) Lack of agency for the protagonist. For the first 2/3 of the novel, Gamma has basically no agency at all. He's told to do something, so he goes and starts to do it. He is continually carried along by events, sometimes quite literally being reprogrammed to do the bidding of others. He pops in and out of danger mainly due to external causes and not his own actions. Rooting for Gamma is like rooting for a rag doll.
2) Passivity that strains belief. Within his first few hours of being alive, Gamma is repeatedly attacked by robots that intend to destroy him and androids that want to take over his brain. Despite the astonishing frequency of these attacks, it never occurs to Gamma that he might get attacked again and that maybe he should come up with some way of defending himself - even something like a length of pipe to use as a club.
3) Exceptionally clunky exposition. Gamma has another personality, Katie, living in his head. Katie is a digital replica of one of Starship's now deceased humans. Katie continually argues with Gamma, or encourages him, or warns him against certain actions. But I can't count the number of times they have conversations like this: Katie: "Whatever you do, don't go through that door." Gamma: "Why not? What's back there?" Katie: "It's bad. You wouldn't like it." **Disappears and refuses to give any more information**
Half of the problems Gamma encounters are things Katie warns him about without telling him why he should care. It's an expository device to avoid giving the reader information Mr. Knight doesn't want us to know yet, but it is vastly overused.
TL;DR A decent read, main problem is I didn't like the protagonist. I really don't like quirky, goofy always trying to be funny characters and that's exactly what we're dealing with here. The story was interesting and I did like the whole ship full of robots. It reminded me of a game called "NieR: Automata".
My Scoring System I have five things I look for in a book, if the book checks all five it's a 5/5 stars book, if it checks none it's a 1/5 stars and everything else is a combination:
✓ - Main Story: I liked it, all the different robots and areas in the ship were cool to visualize and read about.
✓ - Side Stories (if it applies): I enjoyed reading about Kaydee's backstory, I found her an interesting character.
✓ - Characters: Pretty much every character except our main protagonist was great. Even the evil robots that we fight.
✓ - Setting/Ambiance: The whole story is in a ship composed of different areas and they were all interesting and cool to go though.
X - Ending: Wasn't anything spectacular but it didn't ruin the story. Average in my opinion.
Extensive Review Our main protagonist is a vessel that it's purpose is to be filled with a mind, at the beginning we meet The Librarian, which will be our mind, a few pages later he gets killed and we get a different one called Kaydee. I don't understand the purpose of The Librarian. I guess it was so that our mind can have access to his memories and explain why he can do some stuff... The important thing is that at least Kaydee is a cool character and I like her. This would have been a rough read if it were just our main protagonist alone. Later on we will meet Delta, if this book had Delta as our protagonist with Kaydee as her mind it would be a way better story I have no doubt about that. The side characters we meet along the way were interesting and the hacking part that the vessels and robots do was interesting. A nice story overall, wish we had Delta as our main girl but alas...
A generation starship, but does it still qualify as a generation starship when there aren't any humans left? That's a good question, and although the story doesn't explore that aspect of things, it does tackle other questions, just as interesting. The story isn't spectacular, but it does offer some interesting perspectives, and is probably worth the read for anyone who likes generation ship stories, as well as those who enjoy the kind of science fiction that provokes deep thinking. Admittedly, the story could have been done better, there's too much mixing of the virtual and the real for my tastes here, often to the point where even the characters themselves can't tell the difference, and that tends to confuse the issues a bit, but for the most part, the story is relatively well done, so it should work for a lot of scifi fans.
I wanted to enjoy this book, the whole concept sounded fun, but for some reason, while I was able to finish it I just didn't feel connected to it.
I wanted to write something about it but since finishing it all I can muster to say about the book is 'meh'.
It has all the components I like, space flight, robots, etc. However it just was too jumbled for me. I lost track of who's perspective we were telling the story through about half way through, kept getting the delta/gamma character confused.
The Delta character just seemed to be there to be the warrior class, but running around with a sword fighting mechs seemed weird at best to me, and the fight scenes kinda just 'happened' with mcguffins that healed them up after.
I'm not sure if I'll continue the series or not, book left with more to come. It was a lot like Red Mars to me in that none of the characters were redeemable and if they all died who cares. Maybe?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
It took me forever to finish this book. It was not at all what I expected. I’m NOT a computer techie, therefore I didn’t understand the majority of it. I found it to be incredibly boring and not at all understandable! I’m one of those people who when they start something they have to finish it. This includes books. Like I said, it was boring and long, but I finished it, it wasn’t until the last chapter that I finally began to be interested, only to be slapped in the face when I realized I would have to read a whole other book to have a satisfactory ending, (maybe—was there a 3rd book, a 4th, etc…..?). I quit, I will not be reading another book from this author. The only reason I gave it a 2 rating was because of the last chapter.
I almost put the digital book down, as the start did not really appeal to me. However, I stuck with it. The plot thickened and he storyline gave life to the characters. Maybe the characters needed that slow start. I cannot image what it would be like to wake up and have most memories wiped from existence. After reading so many sci-Fi books, I kind of predicted the end. An end that was good, plus keeps you interested in continuing to the next book. Thanks for the entertaining read.
This review is for my own personal memory. Not sure it will be a use to anyone else.
I seem to have got into a strange trend of reading books about sentient robots.
Not sure why I liked this one so much. It is not as funny, witty, or charismatic as Murderbot. At the same time I liked it much better than Service Model. The character of the main vessel is interesting and naive, yet somehow engaging. Not sure I liked it enough to read the next one in the series.
This review also applies to the 2nd and 3rd books of the series - It was a very enjoyable read. The concept was interesting, and the characters were very well-developed and likeable. The plot has very good pacing too. My only (slight) criticism is that transitions between the physical world and digital were understated, making it difficult for readers to follow which reality was being described at the time. Still, I would definitely recommend this series.
I enjoyed this book. Knight has a great imagination, and his style of writing allowed me to use my imagination while I was reading. I found the characters interesting, but after a while, the plot became predictable. I guess this is necessary because how would the story continue if something permanent occurred? I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys SciFi.
It was hard to relate to a character that is not human. This book was both fascinating and boring. Lots of physical fighting (mechanical against mechanical). Just as we were finally going to get to the good stuff, the actual resolution of the problem, the book ends. I didn't care enough to get the next one and read on, especially if it was going to be more of the same.
A really enjoyable read, a sci fi story with more than one twist that keeps you enthralled all the way from start to finish. I look forward to reading the next in the series.
I’m more of a Star Wars type. This just wan’t my cup of tea. There are some exceptional themes that I’ve never seen in a SiFi story before. I accept that. It’s just that I did not get that excitement I usually have when reading good SiFi.
I think this as close as you can get to being in the head of an Android.
It is a very well told story. The changes of perspective from internal (in his program) to real world can be disorienting at first but eventually add greatly to the tale.
Well I did like this book. It took a while to get into the story and it is worth the read. I am going to read book 2. If you enjoy science fiction you will like this book.
Plot kept moving, advancing the characters, adding mew twists. Interesting differentiation between robots and different levels of AI and uploaded human minds.
Mech/AI vs human memories. Who wins? Who dies? Questions partially answered yet shrouded in mystery. Continuing the series to find out the answers becomes a must.
This is an interesting novel about a Starship with nothing but downloaded human minds and A.I. machines preparing for a landing at an unknown destination.
I had to read this book slowly...I had some trouble getting interested in it. But the plot finally made sense and I'm glad I stuck with it. On to book 2!